You are here

Home

Role of AI in building models of the pandemic


Governance of Pandemic Response by Artificial Intelligence (Part #2)

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | Refs ]

AI applications to the pandemic: The use of AI with respect to the pandemic has been usefully reviewed according to conventional scientific methodology:

The AAAS report concludes:

This report, together with a commissioned study on the attitudes of marginalized populations toward AI as applied in the context of health and the COVID-19 pandemic will inform the elaboration of a responsibility framework that will provide a roadmap for developing and implementing just and ethical AI-based medical applications. This roadmap will be conceptualized and articulated by a cohort of thought leaders in a wide variety of fields ranging from ethicists to computer specialists and from human rights activists to lawyers and public servants. We anticipate that the result will help both AI practitioners and lawmakers and policy makers to usher a new era for AI-based medical applications.

The AAAS report fails however to address the concerns of those now stigmatized as indulging irresponsibly in vaccine hesitancy -- despite increasing recognition of adverse reactions, now widely supported by data and the necessity to indemnify those held responsible. The focus is on COVID and vaccination not on the psychosocial dynamics within which the pandemic is embedded -- and by which they may be variously exploited..

Relevance of AI modelling to "misinformation"?: Hopefully history will clarify the role of AI in modelling the pandemic and the strategic response by major institutions and governments. At this time the information that is available could be considered part of the problem, given the rmarginalization of those who dare to comment critically on the matter.

A key question is the extent to which  AI modelling take a scientific approach to misinformation as may be variously understood (Varieties of Fake News and Misrepresentation: when are deception, pretence and cover-up acceptable? 2019). The latter notes in particular the range of initiatives empowered by a model by those defensive of its framing. This is otherwise framed as "cover-up" -- organized into a remarkably extensive typology of cover-ups in the relevant Wikipedia entry, based on analysis of a number of typical cases (Vital Collective Learning from Biased Media Coverage: acquiring vigilance to deceptive strategies used in mugging the world, 2014)

Of major concern is whether such models deliberately or effectively exclude as irrelevant all information which does not correspond to the design of the model (Caitlin Johnstone, The Horrifying Rise of Total Mass Media Blackouts on Inconvenient News Stories, Information Clearing House, 3 July 2021). This is naturally a feature of many models framed as a simplified approach to complexity. It is characteristic of some of the constraints on the scientific method reinforcing denial (Knowledge Processes Neglected by Science, 2012). These include failure to take account of the processes documented by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, 2010). Given the advantageous economic implications of the pandemic for some, it would be naive to neglect recognition of its "merchants".

As presented by Mark Hertsgaard (The climate crisis is a crime story, Al Jazeera, 30 June 2021), fossil fuel companies lied for decades about climate change, and humanity is paying the price. Would an analogue be true of pharmaceutical companies now benefitting to such a high degree from the pandemic and the vaccine agenda. Lies or not, should such processes be central to the public narrative?

One example is the set of arguments presented by F. William Engdahl (The Dubious COVID models, the tests, and now the consequences, The Irish Sentinel, 30 April 2020; Can We Trust the WHO?  Global Research, 22 May 2021).

Engdahl notes, in the following terms, the problematic key role of Neil Ferguson in leading the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team -- and the nexus of associations with WHO and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

Two major models are being used in the West since the alleged spread of coronavirus to Europe and USA to â-"e;predictâ-" and respond to the spread of COVID-19 illness. One was developed at Imperial College of London. The second was developed, with emphasis on USA effects, by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, near the home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. What few know is that both groups owe their existence to generous funding by a tax exempt foundation that stands to make literally billions on purported vaccines and other drugs to treat coronavirusâ--The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In early March, Prof. Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London issued a widely-discussed model that forecast possible COVID-19 deaths in the UK as high as 500,000. Ferguson works closely with the WHO. That report was held responsible for a dramatic u-turn by the UK government from a traditional public health policy of isolating at risk patients while allowing society and the economy to function normally. Days after the UK went on lockdown, Ferguson's institute sheepishly revised downwards his death estimates, several times and dramatically. His dire warnings have not come to pass and the UK economy, like most others around the world, has gone into deep crisis based on inflated estimates.

Other facets of this nexus are presented by Peter Koenig (Covid-19: The Great Reset â-- Revisited: Scary Threats, Rewards for Obedience, Global Research, 18 October 2020; Covid-19: The Great Reset â-- Revisited: Scary Threats, Rewards for Obedience, Global Research, 18 October 2020; Depopulation and the mRNA Vaccine: The New York Times Predicts Massive Population Reduction, 8 June 2021) and by Rosemary Frei (The Modelling-paper Mafiosi: the pandemic modellers have a conflict of interest problem, OffGuardian, 18 February 2021).

Whether philosophical and/or speculative, it is remarkable the desperate need to dismiss the framing offered by C. J. Hopkins (The War on Reality, OffGuardian, 30 June  2021):

So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities. Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.... An apocalyptic virus is on the loose. Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people's homes to arrest them for â-"e;illegally gathering outdoors.â-" Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental "vaccines". Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online....

The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a "floating signifier", a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space. [emphasis added]

According to the principles of the scientific method, the information presented in this manner would merit a degree of consideration. If models are constructed such as to exclude the possible relevance of such insights, this would constitute a highly irresponsible approach to risk analysis in modelling the pandemic and its context.

The difficulty seems to be that once there is uncritical reliance on models elaborated with the aid of AI, there is no capacity whatsoever to take account -- and model -- the existence and role of alternative perspectives, in all their diversity. Such perspectives must then be condemned as dangerously aberrant in relation to some norm -- and censored to the extent possible (Eradication as the Strategic Final Solution of the 21st Century? 2014).

Role of AI in enabling misinformation? Given the extensively documented role of AI in future warfare (discussed below), it is appropriate to recall the fundamental importance of deception in military strategy:

  • Hy Rothstein and Barton Whaley (Eds.): The Art and Science of Military Deception (2013)
  • Roy Godson and James J. Wirtz (Eds.): Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge (2002)
  • Barton Whaley: Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War (2007)
  • John Gooch and Amos Perlmutter (Eds.): Military deception and strategic surprise (1982)

From such a perspective, the development of AI in relation to planetary healthcare raises the question as to whether this in fact deliberately takes account (and deploys) some forms of misinformation. Is a degree of deception of the population now to be recognized as vital to the health of the planet -- if not to its inhabitants? Are the more sophisticated uses of AI in relation to the pandemic necessarily enabling the forms of strategic confusion which have become so evident?

Given the considerable familiarity with double-agents, as deployed by the intelligence and security services, any AI model of pandemic response would be crude if it failed to envisage the possibility of enabling those to be deprecated as a source of misinformation -- if only as "honey traps".

The analysis of the deprecated processes deployed in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica has shown their success in the manipulation of public opinion, as other wise shown (Tristan Greene, Study shows how dangerously simple it is to manipulate voters (and daters) with AI, Neural, 22 April 2021). This suggests that there would be strong arguments for using such techniques in the disruption of conventional responses to crises. The latter can be claimed to have been relatively  ineffective in the past. The AI-based processes could well be used in the deception of many, and especially those in leadership roles -- as is the purpose of deception in military strategy -- in order to "market" perspectives of greater strategic relevance.

The assumptions associated with assessment of AI seemingly ignore the influential framing offered by Leo Strauss and cultivated by his followers. Strauss believed that essential truth about human society and history should be held by an elite and withheld from others who lack the fortitude to deal with truth. In their view it has been necessary to tell lies to people about the nature of political reality...The elite keeps the truth to itself... This gives it insight and ...power that others do not possess  (William Pfaff, The Long Reach of Leo Strauss, International Herald Tribune, 15 May 2003).

As noted by Jim Lobe (Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception, 19 May 2003), deception is considered to be the norm in political life. The political order can only be stable, according to that argument, if it is united by an external threat. Following Machiavelli, Strauss maintained that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured. In his view you have to fight all the time (Thoughts on Machiavelli, 1958).

Given the demonstrated skills of AI in strategic games, it might be asked whether these would be deployed in the response to planetary healthcare. Mass deception would then need to be camouflaged, as discussed separately (Orders of deception and stealth -- in relation to orders of complexity, 2004).

Organized deception? Despite their established credibility in military terms, and in framing the response to the pandemic as a "war", such possibilities do not feature in the "objective" review of the application of AI to the pandemic -- being necessarily framed as "objectionable". This attitude could be compared to the failure by the German military to detect the deception which enabled the success of the Normandy landings by the Allies through Operation Overlord -- which proved so crucial to the outcome of World War II.

If response to the pandemic is to be compared with World War III -- as some have done -- who indeed are the "Germans" to be deceived -- and what form might the "Normandy landings" of an "Operation Overlord" be expected to take, enabled as it then was by the deceptions of Operation Fortitude? (Andrew McLuhan, COVID-19 as World War, Medium, 16 March 2020; Aditya Chakrabortty, Johnson says this is war, The Guardian, 18 March 2020;Â*Peter D. Zimmerman, World War III Has Already Begun, Military.com, 29 October 2020; Eunice Castro Seixas, War Metaphors in Political Communication on Covid-19, Frontiers in Sociology, 25 January 2021).

Despite frequent conspiratorial evocation of the Deep State meme, there is seemingly little reflection on how such organization might be enabled or manipulated by its use of AI. This is especially notable with respect to conspiracies theories with regard to the Deep State within the USA. There is a charming irony to the fact that the principal data centre of the NSA -- the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center -- is based in Bluffdale (Utah).

It is not to be expected that such secretive possibilities would be evoked in the recent report of the US National Intelligence Council (Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, March 2021). Other apparent blindspots in that respect, whether intentional or otherwise, are noted by Michael Marien (Report on Global Reports, 2020-2021: the Whale and the Minnows, Cadmus, 25 June 2021).

The probable extent of deception in relation to the pandemic is more obvious in the widespread recourse to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), whether requested of governments regarding pricing or of patients seeking healthcare following adverse vaccine reactions (Bernadette E. Tamayo, Drug firms demand non-disclosure agreements for vaccines, The Manila Times, 21 January 2021; Barry Schoub, Vaccine negotiation non-disclosure agreements 'the nature of the game', CapeTalk, 28 January 2021). More intriguing is the potential use of injunctions (or "superinjunctions") against revelation of the existence of such NDAs. (COVID-19 Vaccines and Corruption Risks: preventing corruption in the manufacture, allocation and distribtion of vaccines, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)

[Parts: First | Prev | Next | Last | All] [Links: To-K | Refs ]

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

For further updates on this site, subscribe here